Revisit Frank Zappa’s cover of Led Zeppelin song ‘Stairway to Heaven’
In October 2023, the former Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant helped to raise a staggering sum of money for The Cancer Awareness Trust by performing ‘Stairway to Heaven’ for the first time in 16 years. The 75-year-old rockstar famously despises the song but swallowed his pride in the name of charity after an anonymous benefactor donated a conditional six-figure sum.
“Bet I enjoyed that more than him,” the evening’s host, Duran Duran’s Andy Taylor, joked as the performance came to a close. “I know that in this contemporary age of digital stuff, there’s every likelihood that other people will see that,” Plant responded. He then dedicated the song to Taylor, the Cancer Awareness Trust and Led Zeppelin, “wherever they are”.
“I’d break out in hives if I had to sing that song in every show,” Plant previously told the Los Angeles Times in 1988 when discussing ‘Stairway to Heaven’. This opinion hasn’t changed much since, either. Plant later labelled it “that bloody wedding song” after donating $1,000 to a radio station when the host said they would never play the song again if they reached their donation target.
Despite his criticism of the 1971 Led Zeppelin hit, Plant recognised the “incredible” construction of the song during a 2019 radio appearance. “The way that Jimmy [Page] took the music through, and the way that the drums reached almost climaxed and then continued,” he said. “It’s a very beautiful piece. But lyrically, now, and even vocally, I go, ‘I’m not sure about that.’”
Page, who has maintained a more cordial relationship with the track over the years, once explained the intricate composition. “I wanted to put something together which started with quite a fragile, exposed guitar,” he told the BBC. “As far as the instrumentation goes, there are recorders in the early part, which give it a slightly medieval feel. That was an idea of John Paul-Jones to put the recorders on, and he played them. When I first had the idea for ‘Stairway’, that wasn’t what I was thinking, and I was thinking more about the texture of the electric piano.”
“The idea of ‘Stairway’ was to have a piece of music, a composition, whereby it would just keep on unfolding into more layers, more moods,” he added. “The subtlety of the intensity and the overlay of the composition would actually accelerate as it went through on every level, every emotional level, every musical level, so it just keeps opening up as it continues through its passage.”
Continuing, Page remembered an important lesson from his pre-Yardbirds years as a session guitarist. “When I was a session musician, one of the cardinal rules was that you didn’t speed up, and I was keen to do something which had an acceleration to it,” he noted. “Not only from the musical point of view, but the lyricist, so the whole thing would gain momentum as it went through, and it wasn’t just a monotone piece.”
Among the classic song’s many advocates was the progressive American composer Frank Zappa. In 1988, during the musician’s final tour before his death in 1993, he constructed what he deemed to be his greatest-ever backing band.
“[The band] was unique because it combined a very strong five-piece horn section with all kinds of electronic stuff, with effects on the percussion section, on the drums, multiple keyboards—a very interesting blend of this horn harmony and very strange sound effects,” Zappa said while discussing the tour with Guitarist Magazine.
“All those little effects and things coming in, that’s just the way it was on the live show,” he added. “We had three stations generating samples; there was Ed Mann, who had this whole vocabulary of dog barks and bubbles and weird shit, then there was Chad Wackerman, who had all these strange percussion things hooked up to a big rig, and then there was the synclavier, which I could play when I wasn’t playing the guitar.”
During their stop in Vienna, Austria, Zappa and his band performed a cover of Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’.
Watch the performance below.
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